Reproductive Exploitation

Note: The following commentary contains sensitive information that may not be suitable for children.

Ordinarily, columnist Judith Warner of the New York Times is not exactly what you would call a friend of the Christian worldview. Yet from her opposing viewpoint, Warner recently came up with a devastating critique of surrogate motherhood. She drives home exactly what we have been saying on this program for some time now: that we are turning children into commodities, which is harmful to everyone involved.

In this case, Warner focuses a much-needed spotlight on the role of poor women in India who are being paid to act as surrogate mothers on behalf of childless Americans. She writes, "Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme."

That's an image that would make anyone uncomfortable. But why should it? On the surface, everybody benefits from the situation. The wealthy but childless Americans get the babies they have longed for; the Indian women get the money they need. As one such woman, Nandani Patel, told NPR, the money she was paid for being a surrogate mother enabled her and her husband to buy a house that they never could have afforded otherwise.

Then why does the concept of surrogacy cause such revulsion in Warner and others? Warner herself has a difficult time explaining it. Our feelings and ethics related to the subject, she writes, are "murky, ambiguous and confused."

I would submit that the reason for the revulsion is that we cannot get away from the law written on our hearts, which tells us that the Creator has an intentional design for our families that benefits and protects men, women, and children.

And when we deliberately try to circumvent that design, the frightening truth is that we end up using people: men for their sperm, women for their eggs or their body parts. And sadly, we even use the resulting children for our own gratification. If you doubt it, remember what I said recently about a process called selective reduction. That is a procedure where, as author Liza Mundy described, mothers who were desperate for children actually lie there and watch on a screen while one or more of their implanted embryos are selected out and killed! People want children, yes, but they want them on their own terms.

So as Judith Warner says, the discomfort and confusion that surround surrogacy serve a purpose. They remind us "that there is more to the process of carrying a baby and giving birth to it than being an incubator on legs." No amount of money or "empowerment" that surrogacy brings to women in need can erase that fundamental truth.

When Warner argues for improving adoption procedures and living conditions for women around the world instead of renting out wombs, she is actually touching on a basic tenet of the Christian worldview, whether she recognizes it or not.

That tenet is that every human life has value and dignity-not because we can use that life to satisfy a need or desire, but because the Creator of all life made us in His image and values us beyond all comprehension.

Judith Warner, “Outsourced Wombs,” Domestic Disturbances blog, New York Times, 3 January 2008.

“‘Wombs for Rent’ Grows in India,” Marketplace, NPR, 27 December 2007.